Assume the Position: Memoirs of an Obstetrician Gynecologist (22 page)

However, those who ultimately choose to live there find it because of the summer.  One summer my wife and I did visit and really fell in love, so much so that we bought land at 10,000 feet above sea level in a beautiful aspen forest with a year long bubbling glacial creek adjacent to a ski run.  For us it was initially just a land investment, but a magical one at that. We had no intention of ever living there or building a home there.  But things have a way of changing.

     One day around the age of 50 I came home to my wife who said:  “ Change your life, or change your wife.”   We had always been friends and still were. My health and our relationship were uppermost in her mind. She correctly sensed I was unhappy.  I had gained weight.  She said I looked gray and had one foot in the grave.  I was in the prime of my medical career, at the top of my game, and felt like I still had much to offer my patients.  It was me that I hadn’t given much thought to over the years.  It was always about someone else first. I had successfully learned how to compartmentalize my emotions, perhaps appropriate to practice good objective medicine, but not conducive to a good lasting personal relationship.   I wasn’t aware of my own feelings and dissatisfactions.  As difficult as it was for me to do, after considerable thought and the realization that she was indeed correct, I decided to walk away from it all. So I changed my life!  And she saved my life for the first time.

     In the intervening years we had built a home that we used as a vacation home on our property in Telluride, Colorado.  Now we decided to move from Phoenix. We sold our home there, took a year to unwind our professional and business affairs, said good by to our friends who thought we were insane to move to an isolated little ski town in the mountains of Colorado, got in our car with our kids and dogs, and off we went on another nomadic journey. We said goodbye to Arizona after 21 years in the desert. 

     Many of my patients were upset since I was the only physician for whom they had ‘assumed the position’, not an easy thing for any woman with which to get comfortable. Most patients just couldn’t understand it and were not happy that they would have to start over again with someone else. I received many thoughtful and loving cards when I left practice.  There was one patient, though, who understood it quite well. She had been a patient of mine for years.  Her father was in his early 70’s and still practicing solo as a family physician in Phoenix.  I always had the utmost respect for those physicians who could continue to practice solo and do so for that many years.  It takes a very special, dedicated, and committed individual.  She asked me how many years I had been practicing OB-GYN.  I sat there on the exam room stool, thought about it, and replied 25 years.  She looked me straight in the eyes and said, “ That is a wonderful career, a long time, and you have every right to move on and do something else.”  As the daughter of a father who had not done so, she spoke from the heart and could empathize with me. I felt as if she had given me permission, that it was acceptable, and I should not be so hard on myself.

     One of the many things that I learned as an obstetrician was the ability to see with clarity into the future, or at least 9 months into the future, and then make it come true. It is not something the average human being can do.   All of my training, years of clinical experience and expertise was geared to producing a healthy baby and mother 9 months after they first appeared in my office as a unit.  We look at numbers, examine patients, feel abdomens, perform ultrasounds, look at labs, listen to and measure babies one way or the other, all with the idea that everything must turn out perfectly 9 months down the road on separation from each other. There was no room for error.  We think like this dozens of times a day, day in and day out, and do get to the point where the future is clear. This time, however, I had no idea what was to come next, which was both the fear and the excitement!

     As a physician, there is really no such thing as life after medicine; once a physician, always a physician. The very word physician implies teaching, learning, sharing, healing.  So it is not something one really ever walks away from when one decides to stop clinical practice. It becomes part of one’s personality.  It is rather a decision of how one chooses to live life now that circumstances have changed.  What I knew was that I no longer wanted employees lives to manage any more; if I were to do anything I wanted to be solo.  I no longer wanted a rigid schedule to adhere to.  I no longer wanted to be indoors in an office all day, nor did I want to get into the elevator of my office building any more.  I no longer wanted to be driving back and forth to the hospital night and day. I no longer wanted business partners anymore, other than my own family.  But what did I want to do with my life?  That took some thought.  Spending time in Africa helped me sort out what I didn’t want.  I came to the realization that I still had an active license to practice medicine, I had a lot of medical information in my head, and I was still a physician.  Truly, a medical degree and license are valuable documents to possess.

I was now living in Colorado, a great place for people with rugged individualism and independent spirit. Telluride, Colorado was one of the most politically liberal, progressive, beautiful communities in the whole State.

     (Telluride, Colorado in the early fall.)

This is what appealed to me and was one of many reasons I continued to return there as I did from Africa for the next phase of my life.  While I was gone my wife and youngest son, still at home, settled in for our new life. I reasoned that with all the famous names living full or part time in this small town, Dan Quayle, Norman Schwarzkopf, Tom Cruise, Laura Linney, Dick Ebersol, Oprah Winfrey, Richard Holbrooke, Clive Cussler, Meg Whitman, Oliver Stone, Sylvester Stallone, Ralph Lauren, Jerry Seinfeld, and those who visited like Andre Agassi, Steffi Graf, Lionel Ritchie, Donald Trump, Dennis Rodman, all of them but one for their own reasons wanted some peace and privacy in their lives. 

     The rest of the town folk respected the privacy of those they passed on the street, which was unique about this beautiful and isolated ski town. In town there were Swedes and Finns who resided here for generations, all from mining families.  There were people who just loved living here because of the natural beauty of the place.  There were hard-core naturalists and environmentalists, massage therapists, physical therapists, and alternative therapists.   There were hippies and lots of fit young and old people alike who just wanted to ski, paraglide, hike, mountain climb and ice climb, to fly fish, snowmobile or ride horses. There were lawyers, doctors, investors, arms manufacturers, restaurateurs, realtors, bankers, cooks, waiters and waitresses, authors, politicians, and businessmen and women that were all essential to make a viable small town of 2500 people a mountain community with a great Main street that was very fun and functional. There was an exceptional high school and teachers.  Telluride was often featured in commercials and movies simply because of its beauty.  In the gorgeous mountain summertime there were lively festivals every weekend, from Mountain Film, to Bluegrass, Jazz, Chamber Music, Mushroom, Balloon, Wine, and the Telluride Film festival that annually brought the glitterati from Hollywood, New York and around the world to this mountain playground.  

     The one person who never seemed to fit was Stallone, who in the early days of Mountain Village bought up a huge number of lots for his friends and cronies.  One large lot was reserved for his personal use and for his polo ponies.  At the time when he bought all these parcels they were located on or around Tooth Street high in the Mountain Village, so named by the developer, a former dentist. Ski runs, Aspen trees, and large Colorado blue spruce trees surrounded the area adjacent to where my wife and I bought a parcel just before him.

It was never easy to say we lived on Tooth Street, anyhow. So we were happy with the new street name – Rocky Road.   Not long after, Stallone picked up and left Telluride to move on to Aspen, more to his liking with more ‘party’ action and attention.

     Telluride had a reputation for hosting one of the best 4
th
of July parades in the country.  Excitement would mount in front of the courthouse on Main Street at 10:45 AM. During the time I lived there, General Norman Schwarzkopf would shake hands with the local Veterans who led the parade and the Pledge of Allegiance. The roar of two fighter jets would buzz the town at rooftop level and head straight to the end of the box canyon towards Ajax peak, a 14er, then shoot straight up at a 90 angle.  It was a pretty awesome sight.  I was always curious how this start for the 4
th
of July parade got arranged, who authorized it, and who other than us tax payers paid for the fuel. Yet it still was an awesome sight.  Then the parade began. The main street was lined with chairs filled with families 7-8 deep from all over the state and surrounding states.  Dogs and little kids on bikes decorated with red, white and blue streamers, floats with local bands and drums beating out a rhythm, Men without Rhythm dancing helter skelter in tune to no one (often local politicians), fire engines blaring their horns, town notables in open air classic vehicles, women of the Wild West dressed in 19
th
Century fashion riding side saddle on horses, Rowdy Roudebusch (a local cowboy), occasionally inebriated riding his stallion down the street and later into the Sheridan Bar for a drink – one after another, each a more colorful entry than the one before, the parade wound slowly down the Main Street. It was a hoot. When the parade was all over everyone headed to town-park for an old fashioned barbecue sponsored by the local volunteer fire department members who had earlier prepared and cooked the food. They raised money by donations for the evening’s fireworks, a splendid array against the massive mountains, lit by stars and the moon.  This was Telluride in all its summer glory.

      The winter was simple; just snow, and lots of it, with great steep skiing right down into the town on the most infamous steep double black diamond ski run, the Plunge. For me, Milk Run and Bushwhacker were my favorite ski runs.  There was a free gondola connecting the Town of Mountain Village to the Town of Telluride, one of the most awesome free rides anywhere in the Country.   All in all, it was a special place with special people lucky enough to live there and they all knew it.

     My wife and I were quick to meet people and make friends.

We volunteered for many local charities and shared the philosophy that it was important to leave a place even better than we found it.  We joined the Telluride Foundation, a non-profit that raised funds for other non-profits and organizations in the County. As a benefit we had many occasions to ski what was referred to as ‘First Tracks” before the mountain opened to the general public, usually from 7-9 AM when no one else was on the mountain. While the sun was just rising over the glorious mountain peaks, and the clouds were a beautiful pastel pink, it was often cold, frosty, but always pristine on the mountain at that time of the morning in midwinter.  Then we would adjourn to someone’s beautiful slope side home for breakfast and ski home by 11.

     On one of these occasions we sat by a hot fire drinking hot chocolate.  The presentation featured Franz Klammer, Olympic gold medalist, and Franz Weber, World speed skiing champion. Films of their great runs and brutal crashes were shown to pump everyone up before we left for the First Tracks skiing.  As luck would have it I got on the same chair lift with one other fellow and the two Franz’s.  After brief introductions, I turned to Klammer, my skiing idol, and asked.  “I have always wondered what goes through your head when you are skiing on the edge at 60-70 miles or more per hour, then you look down and realize there is only one ski on the ground, the other is out of control, and there is that split second before you realize you are going to crash?”  He looked at Weber, then at me, and said one word –  “Shit”.  We all laughed.  For me, that resonated!

     In my mind’s eye, I pictured myself skiing like Klammer, though there was absolutely no comparison other than it was the way I wanted to ski and we each had a pair of skis on our feet. It was all about going straight down hill for me as fast as I safely could without falling or hitting a tree.  As a friend of mine said about my skiing, “ You were absent from ski class the day they talked about turning!” Fortunately I had good balance, because my form was severely lacking.  But I was always smiling when on skis, the cold fresh mountain air on my face and in my lungs. It was exhilarating!

     Most of my life, I felt much better being in control.  It didn’t matter whether it was of my own emotions, choosing college courses that I knew were best for me and my chosen career, skiing my own way in my own style, or managing my patient’s pregnancies and surgeries.   I looked for ways that I knew would give the best outcome. I didn’t mind being on the edge, or even not knowing what was coming next, because I trusted in my ability to keep things from getting out of control. I didn’t like chaos and I didn’t enjoy not having control of my life.